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(Disclosure: I lead PM/UX for Flutter & Dart.) For sure, anything that I could say along the lines of "we're not shutting Flutter down" might be taken as havin

(Disclosure: I lead PM/UX for Flutter & Dart.) For sure, anything that I could say along the lines of "we're not shutting Flutter down" might be taken as having overtones of the Baghdad Bob meme. And indeed, why should you trust my word? The reason you should feel confident to use Flutter is because it's strongly in our business interest to invest in it. Over 600,000 apps in the Play Store alone are already written using Flutter, to say nothing of the countless apps for iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux and web. The list includes big brands like Alibaba, BMW, eBay, and SHEIN. Neither Google as a whole, nor Android in particular would be better off if Flutter didn't continue to flourish. Aside from that, there are thousands of engineers at Google who use Dart and Flutter internally to build a wide variety of apps. There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over. Lastly, Flutter is very successful. It has a developer base of several million, is growing quickly, and developers tell us it makes them more productive (https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-productivity-475f713724b3 https://medium.com/flutter/does-flutter-boost-developer-prod...). Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services, so we have a vested interest in continuing that. Even if it weren't for Google, there are more contributors to Flutter from outside Google than there are Flutter team employees. Those contributors include big companies like Samsung, Canonical and Sony, as well as prolific individual developers like @a14n (https://github.com/a14n https://github.com/a14n). We're working hard on lots of fun new stuff right now, including a rewrite of our graphics rendering engine. If you haven't seen it, check out https://wonderous.app https://wonderous.app, which is using the new engine on iOS. We think it shows the potential of Flutter well!

fatherOfLegends 4y ago
Thanks Tim, I appreciate you calling out these things but I feel it would make a bigger impression to elaborate on how much the Flutter community supports the development of Flutter. People are afraid of losing Google's support because they assume that without Google's contribution the framework would not continue to grow. Firebase is a google product (not an OS framework) that Google could kill off and no one could do anything about it. It they decided to shut it down every app depending on it would go down the day day they turned it off.I don't see people being equally concerned about using Firebase because Google could kill it. It makes sense to use it because it is cheaper and faster to get started than creating your own backend and all of the related services. If they did shut it down people expect to get enough lead time to transition to something else. Using Flutter is less risky than depending on any Google service. Additionally Flutter development is faster and requires fewer engineers for the same output. Flutter code is more testable and reliable than any other option that runs on the same platforms. Flutter does not require QA teams or additional quality engineers when you leverage its full testability. Flutter runs on everything, if suddenly Oracle won a lawsuit and manufacturers stopped making Android devices Flutter would run on the next mobile OS, or the next anything OS. Regardless of what Google does in the future Flutter is the safest bet a startup can make and it is the smartest bet a mature company can make. The gains you will make in the meantime using Flutter outweigh the risks.
Sebb767 4y ago
My honest condolences that you have to do damage control here to save your project after your employer did something stupid (again). I've been in this position, it's not great.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fomine3 4y ago
Thanks, internal use and support Play store apps makes sense to keep it.
nhannah 4y ago
I use Flutter every day...your team needs to be more transparent. Tangible answers and numbers, "Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services", is great, but those services and APIs have a variety of other entry points not using Flutter, they don't depend on it. How is Flutter funded? It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia, does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget? There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true? Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps? Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment? "600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects, does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal? Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect. "It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users, how many use it weekly / monthly? Flutter has a large DevRel push, how many of these projects / users are students who just spin it up once and hit star on GH when asked and never touch it again? Your team was asked approximately this question by a MSFT employee looking at publishing info on cross platform framework adoption vs native and could not get a straight answer I was told. Multiple Flutter related posts by agencies and evangelists point to a google trends page or GH stars saying Flutter is blowing up in popularity compared to other frameworks, but when you start looking at core packages searched for and starred for each framework the Flutter trend reverses, is this because the words Flutter and Dart are too common and in actuality the popularity is not what is being projected in trends? Is this because DevRels directly ask people to star the core project? I ask Flutter GDE's these questions and they come off like they can't be trusted to be honest on these topics for fear of losing status. I have also heard a certain outspoken Flutter GDE mention on stream other frameworks have much larger communities, how can this jive with these purported trends? It seems as though the community size and growth of Flutter is projected to be greater than it is, that's subjectively how it feels as a dev as well I will note as someone who is using packages / repos, and that is worrisome. I worry that the first time we hear solid numbers will be in a blog post about the Flutter project ending with an explanation that low enterprise adoption and direct or indirect revenue could not support the scale of this ambitious a project. It would be great to hear some hard facts that give people confidence in adoption and that Flutter has long term backing higher in the company. If this is not the case, honesty would be nice as well. @a14n seems to have tailed off on his work on Flutter quite a bit, which worries me if he is the core example of users who would pick this up in an OSS abandonment situation. Even now it feels as though if major OSS package maintainers like Remi Rousselet walked away the community would be hit hard. I can't imagine the project continuing without Google, especially with Dart needing the same treatment if Flutter was killed. Dart issues with notes saying the team lacks bandwidth exist now, I just can't see it working even with some other companies interested, Flutter/Dart need full enterprise backing at this stage. "which is using the new engine on iOS" - An aside... I downloaded the app, it seems pretty smooth, not sure the FPS but I saw minimal jank which is great. BUT, it still has the biggest complaint I hear about Flutter apps on iOS, feel. On iOS is does not feel native, the scrolling and gestures feel off. This is part of what I was referring to regarding ignoring polish on iOS in favor of expansion earlier, iOS still feels second class on Flutter. I have watched a friend delete a flutter app from their phone right after installing with the reasoning "I hate when apps feel like that, it's so obnoxious", these people exist, they feel Flutter apps are second class, this sentiment will 100% drive away enterprise adoption imho. Even recently a user on the flutterdev subreddit said they were leaving Flutter behind just do to this persistent user feedback. My final thought is the same as my first, be more transparent, show the community with tangible honest numbers and backing Flutter is not in jeopardy, otherwise the track record (and imho vague mushy pumped up stats) makes it appear it is.
sirius87 4y ago
Thanks for taking the time to address concerns here. Much appreciated! Most of the anxiety and concern isn't from the Flutter project itself so I wholly empathize, but from Google's history in the dev space. Virtually anyone who had an AngularJS codebase knows what it means to depend on a Google OSS product that Google uses internally. > There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over. IIRC, when the AngularJS team came out with a brand new JS framework and called it "Angular", I believe the team explained how they automated migration of most of Google's "millions of lines" of complex internal codebase from AngularJS to Angular in a relatively short time, thanks to Google's internal infrastructure and tooling. You could do dependency analysis, build ASTs across projects, at "Google scale", and have special tooling, transpilers, compilers to migrate code across Ads and verticals in a fortnight. Google has the talent, tools, cash to take such grand measures and come to conferences to showcase how they did it. So the several million devs using Flutter are still undertaking a risk if Google deems targeting each new iOS version UX is too expensive, freezes contributions from internal devs, and starts internally migrating codebases to native with some shiny, new internal tooling. EDIT: If such a scenario does come to pass internally, I think the Flutter community would very much appreciate project leaders being upfront about it.
- ssmsjm 4y ago
  Let me just go cry over here in AngularDart.
- timsneath 4y ago
  Interestingly, that's exactly what is going on internally at the moment with Dart code, as we migrate the Google ecosystem to sound null safety, which was introduced in Dart 2 and will be the only mode in Dart 3. Adding a feature like sound null safety to a codebase the size of Google's is a large undertaking. It also brings a ton of benefit, both to the language itself and code that has migrated, since we can now provide guarantees around nullability that are not available in most other languages. But all the tooling we built for that multi-million LOC migration is open source, and available to everyone as part of the core SDK (https://dart.dev/null-safety/migration-guide#migration-tool https://dart.dev/null-safety/migration-guide#migration-tool). It's sophisticated, migrates much code automatically, and provides a visual editor to help make decisions about other code. That should be evidence at least that we care about migration. Every ecosystem goes through migrations at some point (Objective-C to Swift, Java to Kotlin, Win32 to UWP, etc.) Flutter isn't immune to that risk, but I don't think it's particular to Flutter either.

fatherOfLegends 4y ago

Thanks Tim, I appreciate you calling out these things but I feel it would make a bigger impression to elaborate on how much the Flutter community supports the development of Flutter. People are afraid of losing Google's support because they assume that without Google's contribution the framework would not continue to grow. Firebase is a google product (not an OS framework) that Google could kill off and no one could do anything about it. It they decided to shut it down every app depending on it would go down the day day they turned it off.I don't see people being equally concerned about using Firebase because Google could kill it. It makes sense to use it because it is cheaper and faster to get started than creating your own backend and all of the related services. If they did shut it down people expect to get enough lead time to transition to something else. Using Flutter is less risky than depending on any Google service. Additionally Flutter development is faster and requires fewer engineers for the same output. Flutter code is more testable and reliable than any other option that runs on the same platforms. Flutter does not require QA teams or additional quality engineers when you leverage its full testability. Flutter runs on everything, if suddenly Oracle won a lawsuit and manufacturers stopped making Android devices Flutter would run on the next mobile OS, or the next anything OS. Regardless of what Google does in the future Flutter is the safest bet a startup can make and it is the smartest bet a mature company can make. The gains you will make in the meantime using Flutter outweigh the risks.

Sebb767 4y ago

My honest condolences that you have to do damage control here to save your project after your employer did something stupid (again). I've been in this position, it's not great.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fomine3 4y ago

Thanks, internal use and support Play store apps makes sense to keep it.

nhannah 4y ago

I use Flutter every day...your team needs to be more transparent. Tangible answers and numbers, "Happy developers are a prerequisite for a wide variety of other Google APIs and services", is great, but those services and APIs have a variety of other entry points not using Flutter, they don't depend on it. How is Flutter funded? It was said a few years ago the budget came from internal projects like ads, fuchsia, pay, and stadia, does stadia being killed effect the Flutter budget? There was an implication at that time that if they all died or left Flutter then it would be killed via budget cuts, is that true? Why is Flutter not being adopted by Google for more outward facing apps? Is it seen internally as at risk of abandonment? "600,000 apps in the Play Store alone", how many of these are commercial vs hobby projects, does Google really care about these if enterprise adoption is minimal? Delving into game dev when iOS is not polished seemed like a decision made because there was a need to show potential value via expansion upward in the org, I was concerned this was a hail mary when announced, and with Stadia now gone the timing seems more suspect. "It has a developer base of several million", how many of these are again hobby users, how many use it weekly / monthly? Flutter has a large DevRel push, how many of these projects / users are students who just spin it up once and hit star on GH when asked and never touch it again? Your team was asked approximately this question by a MSFT employee looking at publishing info on cross platform framework adoption vs native and could not get a straight answer I was told. Multiple Flutter related posts by agencies and evangelists point to a google trends page or GH stars saying Flutter is blowing up in popularity compared to other frameworks, but when you start looking at core packages searched for and starred for each framework the Flutter trend reverses, is this because the words Flutter and Dart are too common and in actuality the popularity is not what is being projected in trends? Is this because DevRels directly ask people to star the core project? I ask Flutter GDE's these questions and they come off like they can't be trusted to be honest on these topics for fear of losing status. I have also heard a certain outspoken Flutter GDE mention on stream other frameworks have much larger communities, how can this jive with these purported trends? It seems as though the community size and growth of Flutter is projected to be greater than it is, that's subjectively how it feels as a dev as well I will note as someone who is using packages / repos, and that is worrisome. I worry that the first time we hear solid numbers will be in a blog post about the Flutter project ending with an explanation that low enterprise adoption and direct or indirect revenue could not support the scale of this ambitious a project. It would be great to hear some hard facts that give people confidence in adoption and that Flutter has long term backing higher in the company. If this is not the case, honesty would be nice as well. @a14n seems to have tailed off on his work on Flutter quite a bit, which worries me if he is the core example of users who would pick this up in an OSS abandonment situation. Even now it feels as though if major OSS package maintainers like Remi Rousselet walked away the community would be hit hard. I can't imagine the project continuing without Google, especially with Dart needing the same treatment if Flutter was killed. Dart issues with notes saying the team lacks bandwidth exist now, I just can't see it working even with some other companies interested, Flutter/Dart need full enterprise backing at this stage. "which is using the new engine on iOS" - An aside... I downloaded the app, it seems pretty smooth, not sure the FPS but I saw minimal jank which is great. BUT, it still has the biggest complaint I hear about Flutter apps on iOS, feel. On iOS is does not feel native, the scrolling and gestures feel off. This is part of what I was referring to regarding ignoring polish on iOS in favor of expansion earlier, iOS still feels second class on Flutter. I have watched a friend delete a flutter app from their phone right after installing with the reasoning "I hate when apps feel like that, it's so obnoxious", these people exist, they feel Flutter apps are second class, this sentiment will 100% drive away enterprise adoption imho. Even recently a user on the flutterdev subreddit said they were leaving Flutter behind just do to this persistent user feedback. My final thought is the same as my first, be more transparent, show the community with tangible honest numbers and backing Flutter is not in jeopardy, otherwise the track record (and imho vague mushy pumped up stats) makes it appear it is.

sirius87 4y ago

Thanks for taking the time to address concerns here. Much appreciated! Most of the anxiety and concern isn't from the Flutter project itself so I wholly empathize, but from Google's history in the dev space. Virtually anyone who had an AngularJS codebase knows what it means to depend on a Google OSS product that Google uses internally. > There are many millions of lines of code written that power everything from Ads to our internal CRM system. Google wouldn't be better off if we had to throw all that code away and start over. IIRC, when the AngularJS team came out with a brand new JS framework and called it "Angular", I believe the team explained how they automated migration of most of Google's "millions of lines" of complex internal codebase from AngularJS to Angular in a relatively short time, thanks to Google's internal infrastructure and tooling. You could do dependency analysis, build ASTs across projects, at "Google scale", and have special tooling, transpilers, compilers to migrate code across Ads and verticals in a fortnight. Google has the talent, tools, cash to take such grand measures and come to conferences to showcase how they did it. So the several million devs using Flutter are still undertaking a risk if Google deems targeting each new iOS version UX is too expensive, freezes contributions from internal devs, and starts internally migrating codebases to native with some shiny, new internal tooling. EDIT: If such a scenario does come to pass internally, I think the Flutter community would very much appreciate project leaders being upfront about it.

ssmsjm 4y ago
Let me just go cry over here in AngularDart.
timsneath 4y ago
Interestingly, that's exactly what is going on internally at the moment with Dart code, as we migrate the Google ecosystem to sound null safety, which was introduced in Dart 2 and will be the only mode in Dart 3. Adding a feature like sound null safety to a codebase the size of Google's is a large undertaking. It also brings a ton of benefit, both to the language itself and code that has migrated, since we can now provide guarantees around nullability that are not available in most other languages. But all the tooling we built for that multi-million LOC migration is open source, and available to everyone as part of the core SDK (https://dart.dev/null-safety/migration-guide#migration-tool https://dart.dev/null-safety/migration-guide#migration-tool). It's sophisticated, migrates much code automatically, and provides a visual editor to help make decisions about other code. That should be evidence at least that we care about migration. Every ecosystem goes through migrations at some point (Objective-C to Swift, Java to Kotlin, Win32 to UWP, etc.) Flutter isn't immune to that risk, but I don't think it's particular to Flutter either.